Fall 2025 Public Screening Series: Early Jameson | "Big Words... Small Worlds" (1987)

Fall 2025 Public Screening Series: Early Jameson Early Jameson: Film & Theory at the Limits of Culture

Screenings begin at 11:30 AM | Free and open to the public | RSVP @ tania.rispoli@duke.edu | Lunch starts at 11 AM

Hosted by the graduate seminar Early Jameson taught by Ranjana Khanna, this screening series invites the public to engage with film and video works that reflect, refract, and challenge key themes in the intellectual and political trajectory of Fredric Jameson-from Marxism and psychoanalysis to postmodernism, media, and utopia. Each screening will be followed by an informal discussion. Join us in exploring how Jameson's thinking continues to provoke new questions about ideology, cultural production, and the very possibility of critique today.

This series is part of the Future of Critical Thought.

Big Words...Small Worlds Written and narrated by David Lodge. Produced for Channel Four in 1987, this rarely seen documentary captures the 1986 Linguistics of Writing conference at the University of Strathclyde. A snapshot of literary theory at a moment of disciplinary upheaval, it stages encounters between structuralism, poststructuralism, and cultural Marxism-interrogating the politics of form, language, and knowledge.